Hilary and I have the good fortune to live in a town with fairly good water service. Many rural towns in El Salvador rely primarily on (contaminated) well water or on poorly organized water comittees that try to run water out to individual houses and build their own water system. Often the sys...

This coming Saturday Oscar Romero will be beatified by the Catholic Church. It's the last step the church takes prior to naming someone as a saint. I've heard that the ceremony is expected to draw up to half a million visitors in the capital city.

Hilary and I have a new community report up. As always, it's in spanish - so if you don't speak spanish you'll either have to google translate it or just settle for looking at the pictures. You can directly access the report at the link above or at the What ...

Hilary and I have a new community report up. As always, it's in spanish - so if you don't speak spanish you'll either have to google translate it or just settle for looking at the pictures. You can directly access the report at the link above or at the What I'm Doing in El Sa...

PewResearch recently released a report on religious trends in Latin America. Their report addresses an issue that volunteers in El Salvador often express confusion about - the surprising popularity of the evangelical and protestant churches. Take a look at the link, it has a lot of really interesting findings. Here are some that jumped out at me:

Apparently Catholic participation has been slipping since as far back as the late 70's, but only took off after the war ended (which I found surprising. I thought it was a trend that started after the civil war ended in '92). El Salvador has also had the LARGEST shift away from the Catholic church in all of Latin America.

The report also talks about the rising number of "unaffiliated" people. A finding that mirrors Hilary and I's survey results of our community. I remember being surprised at how many men (it was mostly men) that told us that they didn't belong to any church.

The survey results also show that protestants are far more likely than catholics to be involved and participate in poverty alleviation. The report talks about this being a result of the catholic church's focus on "policy and political fixes" to poverty, rather than volunteerism and charity efforts.

Following up from 2014 by the numbers, I decided to put together an album of photos I took over the last year that I particularly liked for one reason or another. In many ways these photos are a more satisfying reflection of my experience in El Salvador than the numbers.
&nb...

Number of (scheduled) meetings: 286
Number of last minute canceled meetings: 120 (cancelation rate of 40%)
Number of town council (ADESCO) meetings held: 14 (with a 5 month gap in-between May and October where the organization collapsed and then was re-formed.)
Number of town council ...

This is a family band from Honduras that was playing in front of the store last night when hilary and I went to go buy sparklers.
They were surprisingly good! Here's one of their songs:
(The little girl you see at the end is playing a turtle =) .)...

This is a little old, but last month was the end of the regular school year in El Salvador. The "summer" break runs from November to January here. The end of the school year always ushers in all kinds of celebrations, one of which is that the school bands all come out and make a lot of noise. ...

I’ve been lax about posting updates recently. That’s because, following the end of the winter festival in Perquin work really started to take off for Hilary and I. Here’s a small look at some of the things we’ve been doing over the past month:
Our project b...

Ever since we first moved to our community people have been telling us about the winter festival in Perquín. It apparently started right after the war ended as a kind of liberal convention of sorts. All of the leaders of the new FMLN political party would come out along with the guerril...

The winter festival just finished up here in Perquín. I'll have a post up about that soon. However, seeing as festivals mean that all work stops, I had some time to keep reflecting on the one year mark in our service. I was especially thinking about this graph that Peace Corps gave us when we...

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to greet a new group of volunteers to El Salvador. It’s only just now that I’m beginning to realize that we’re the "veterans” now. Watching the new kids come off the plane I found myself first marveling at how beautiful these people ...

"The journey is perilous, but the thousands of dollars paid to a coyote to ferry illegals from San Salvador through Mexico to Texas guarantees three tries. My 21-year-old host brother is finished the final transactions to pay a coyote and join his brother and sister in Maryland. He left while I was on vacation."

Rachel is a volunteer here in El Salvador who came in at the same time as me. Although she's living in a different area than I am, she and I are both clearly observing the same phenomena when it comes to the immigration situation.

Her account also really reflects the frustration that we as volunteers feel as bystanders living in the communities where immigrants to the US are coming from.

ps. I know it's a little incestuous to link to a blog post that links itself back to your own post, but Rachel's post was too good and original and insightful not to share here.

There's something about living outside the US that makes people far more patriotic than they ever were in the US. Maybe it's specifically living outside the US in a developing country, where we find ourselves pining for basic guarantees that we never thought about in the US. Maybe it's working for "...

I'm reposting something I liked that came up on one of the El Salvador blogs I follow about the corn here in El Salvador:

Rubbing the kernels off of a dry corn cob is not easy. It requires a calloused thumb. The dry corn is carried to the molina in the same way that the wet corn is carried. The grinder receives the dry kernels and expels the maseca or corn flour. It is difficult to replicate the flavor and texture of Salvadoran pupusas in the US. The corn flour is somehow different.

At the time of writing my post about Lidia back in March, Lidia had not yet arrived in the US. After three weeks of travel Lidia made it into the US.
She then spent a month in Houston in the hands of some sort of social service agency that deals with child immigrants. This organization arra...

Hilary and I just got back from our anniversary trip to Nicaragua. We took a well deserved week off from working with our community to visit the land of lakes and volcanoes. It was a wonderful trip. I can’t say that we did a great job of seeing the “real” Nicaragua since we s...

I have an update coming on the way about our trip to Nicaragua. Since we got back we've been playing with the new puppy in the new house (see my previous post.) He's top heavy (he's got a fat head) and is still trying to figure out how to walk. He also sounds like an ewok

Hilary and I are about to head off to Nicaragua for our second anniversary, but there's cuteness overload that's too good to wait till I get back. Can you see it in the photo below?
That's right, we have a puppy!
Well. We don't have a puppy. It's the...

We're here at the end of the dry season in El Salvador and, while there really are only two "official" seasons in this part of the world (dry and wet), within the seasons you can see some interesting differences.

Most notably is that at the end of the dry season the cicadidae's come out. They sing night and day and when the sun sets they really scream. Here's a recording of them last night as the sun was going down. Turn the volume up all the way with a pair of headphones and you can start to imagine the noise.

So this past week Hilary and I finally moved into our new room. She has a post up on her blog with photos and some more back-story about the move. By the end of our first night here in our site we knew that the room we were placed in was wrong for us (we just didn't FIT!) but that...

Last week the voters in El Salvador went back to the voting booths in a run-off election between the conservative right-wing party (ARENA) and the moderate-left wing party (FMLN). In the first election there were three political parties running for the presidency and the FMLN got 49% of th...

So I've been going over in my head the past couple of weeks over what I wanted my next blog post to be. I have a number partially prepared: foods of el salvador, what we've been doing as volunteers over the past month, the progress our host family has made on our room, the results of an HIV/AIDs tra...

"El Salvador’s 2014 presidential campaign has been long and expensive. It has been characterized by slick marketing campaigns, popular promises, and a lack of serious ideas, particularly about the critical economic, fiscal, and social issues facing the next administration. During the final weeks before the election, a scandal erupted which touched the very heart of the conservative ARENA party and highlighted issues not discussed during typical campaigns: money laundering, corruption, governance and transparency.

The three principal candidates agree on the need for “real change.” For conservatives, “change” is a return to the free market economic and social policies of the previous decades; for the left, change means economic reforms and greater social investment. "

The Center for Democracy in the Americas has a good summary and analysis of the upcoming national elections in El Salvador (February 2nd.) It's a longer document than I'm sure most people care to read, but if you're interested read just the first two pages (the summary).

Hilary and I happen to live in one of the better areas for coffee production in El Salvador. Here in El Salvador people grow arabica, which is the most common variety of coffee grown around the world. At one point in history El Salvador was producing more coffee than any other country in the w...

Cross-posted from the blog of the wonderful Catherine Lampi, currently trapped in the capital - making good use of her privilege. Head on over and read the whole thing.

"

If I were a tourist staying in San Salvador, my understanding of the real problems here would be severely manipulated by the site of fancy cars, shopping centers, mansions in the mountains and influx of American restaurants and stores. It is easy to turn a blind eye to poorer areas of San Salvador when, at the next turn there is a giant Hilton hotel and signs for a Benihana’s steakhouse. Those blinders would only become thicker when I entered the gates of my hotel, protected by armed guards and filled with every comfort I could need. San Salvador, and San Miguel, the second biggest city in El Salvador, offers luxuries and comforts that reach only a small subsector of the population. It is easy to igore the poverty when you can order in sushi or in desperate times call home for money......"

I've got a number of personal El Salvador posts brewing, but I saw this today and thought about my cousins and aunt out on Long Island. Hilary and I are lucky to be living in a country that has some surprisingly strong connections with the United States, which most American's aren't aware of.

El Salvador sits in the top10spots in terms of immigrants legally and illegally entering the United states, which is kind of amazing if you consider that it's competing with countries like China and India and that El Salvador is about the size of Masachussets.

Just last week Hilary and I were chatting with a family who live in Hyattsville, Maryland. They fly down and visit their relatives once a year or so. Considering that we live in a rural area of the country (other volunteers who are FAR more rural than I will contest this description, but objectively speaking we do live in a rural area of the country) it is amazing that I can sit in a hammock out here and talk about the US in detail with people who often know it better than I do.

So last week Hilary and I finally wound up the project we were working on from a day to day basis in La Tejera - our community census project. We visited each house in the community (a little over 100) introducing ourselves and collecting data about the houses. From this data we put together a...

When the seasons change here in the little thumb instead of waiting for the leaves to change colors, you wait until thousands of guerrilla ants sweep through your house, killing every mouse, insect, and stray thing that gets in their way. We came home today to our own personal Planet Earth episode, sweeping through our house.

Luckily these guys cleared out and moved on about 10 minutes after I took the video. We were afraid that they'd spend the night.

Taken from Linda's El Salvador Blog, head over to read the other spooky myths she mentions in her post:
"What about the Siguanaba?" I ask.
No one in the circle has seen the Siguanaba. Some have heard her cry out by the little dirty rivers in the woods. Her voice is beautiful s...

So it's October, which means birthdays for Hil and I.
Our host sister here at the house loves arts and crafts so she had Hil making me a paper mâché piggy bank and me putting together a bouquet of paper flowers. In addition, Hil earned herself a bottle of hibi...

Hil and I are settling into our new site in the Northern part of Morazan, El Salvador and running a community-wide census so that we can get to know the community better. We are staying in the part of the country that was the center of the opposition to the national government during El Salvad...

As we swing in to our last week of training I just want to take a step back from a talking about day to day projects and give an overview of the Peace Corps training model here in El Salvador. I was thinking about this the other day as I was talking to a friend of mine who is...

As part of PC training trainees end up spend up spending one full week living with other current volunteers and seeing what it's like to be a PC volunteer on a day-to-day basis. Here in El Salvador these seven days are split into two different sessions with two different volunteers. We spend a weekend (3 days) with one volunteer ("immersion days") and then we spend four days during the work week with another volunteer ("Field-based training"). The training staff here in El Salvador decided to split up Hil and I for both sessions, so between the two of us we ended up experiencing four different volunteer sites.

During the first out (immersion days) I went to visit a youth development volunteer named Cesar along with another trainee named Frank. Frank has a great post breaking down those three days over on his blog. We stayed in a small community (or caserio) named Buenas Aires. It used to be called Big Lizard but the residents resented the name and changed it. Frank, Cesar, and I managed catch a lucky pickup ride to the top of the mountain where Buenas Aires is:

Although Cesar is a Youth Development volunteer there have been Community Economic Development volunteers in his site in the past. A lot of the projects that those COED volunteers had developed were still running and it was a joy to see those projects. We talked to a lady who ran an gourmet bread business, which was developed by a COED volunteer. We also heard about a weekly trash pickup service that a previous volunteer had arranged from the neighboring city and I saw lots of eco-stoves in people's houses:

These stoves use less wood than conventional fires and they vent the smoke away from people's faces when they cook. Cesar's host family said they didn't like how the stove required a specific size of wood to cook with and she used both the eco-stove and a traditional fire. Our host family also had one, but it went unused during our stay since they had a gas stoves to cook with.

All in al though, the weekend with Cesar was really exciting and it got me excited to be a COED volunteer at my own site.

Cesar also showed us the life of a youth development volunteer. He is a really great teacher and an even better social worker (which is his educational background.) We helped him teach a couple english courses, a class on self-esteem, watched him play in the school band, and played a pick-up game of basketball with a men's team that he had organized. It was a pleasure watching him work with his community and he has a talent for getting people energized and involved that I found myself continuously envying.

It wasn't all work in Buenas Aires though. I also got to experience the tranquilo aspect of a volunteer's life:

Following up from immersion days we had a few days of downtime (see my previous post) and then went off to field based training. This time I was placed with a volunteer named Greg who lives in the most rural site out of all of the volunteers currently serving in El Salvador. To get to Greg's site our PC bus dropped our group off on the side of the highway, where Greg was waiting to guide us up to his site. From there we hiked up, up, up:

To El Piño. El Piño is a tiny caserio consisting of about 30 farming families. There's a small school there (serving students up to 6th grade) with a view that looks like this:

and a church. Greg is currently working to get a basketball court built for the school, is facilitating an eco-brick project , and is working with the municipal government on a project to control erosion around the school yard and to upgrade the school's kitchen. All-in-all, he's a busy guy right now.

While we were visiting Greg we practiced making house visits (which we will be doing for real during our first two months in service), met with the local ADESCO (which is a local volunteer government that most towns have in El Salvador), taught a session about erosion at the school, and helped Greg out on his projects at the school. We played a game of softball on the town's soccer field, which is literally on top of a mountain with a 360 degree vista:

We also had a day where we went out with the kids to create a chalk mural in preparation for Independence Day, which is coming up on the 15th:

It's clear that Greg really loves his community and that his comunity members feel the same way about him. He's lucky to have such a supportive site and extra lucky to have one located in such a stunningly beautiful part of the country.

Oh yeah. While I was at Greg's site I also got to eat an armadillo. That was a thing that happened.

Hil and I just got back from "free weekend," which means we were allowed to do whatever we wanted and travel "freely" for a couple of days. Our training group decided to go all in on a beautiful house for two nights/three days in San Diego, El Salvador.
I was rather impresse...

Our Peace Corps group just returned from field-based training, where trainees are split apart and placed with an active volunteer for three days to see their lives and sites. I have a series of posts on the way but until then here's a collection of animal crossing road signs that I snapped pictures ...